The industry trend has been to continuously increase the number of electronic components inside computing systems. Given the limited footprint of many computing systems, a continuous increase in the number of heat generating components creates challenging heat dissipation issues. These issues if not dealt with adequately can harm the structural and data integrity of the computer system, making the effect felt both at a system and module level.
Most electronic packages or nodes in large environments are housed in stacks disposed in frames that resemble racks or cages. Traditionally, these electronic packages have been cooled by forced air cooling using air moving devices, such as fans and blowers, selectively disposed somewhere in the environment as to allow optimum air flow. These air moving devices are often designed to displace hot air away from the components by creating parallel air flow paths that circulate through the rack or cage like frame or structure.
As the packaging densities increase, however, the air cooling solutions are becoming more prohibitive and costly. In recent years, one particular area of focus has been dedicated to cooling high heat flux microprocessor modules. With an increase in bandwidth and server throughput, large amounts of on-board memory are required to achieve increased performance. As the amount of memory in servers increases so does the number of standard memory packages such as dual in-line memory modules (hereinafter DIMMs). In addition, each package often has increasing power dissipation and tighter DIMM row spacing associated with it. Memory modules can contribute as much as 50% of the total server heat load. As is known, increased power dissipation requires a higher airflow for traditional air cooled servers if the maximum DIMM temperature dictated by reliability is unchanged. Although some enhanced DIMM cooling schemes have been proposed in the art, they do not allow for addition or replacement of DIMMs.
In recent years, direct or indirect liquid cooling has become a more attractive option for the designers of computing systems. Conduction cooling by a liquid cooled structure has been shown to be substantially less burdensome both in terms of energy costs and resource allocations, especially for use in data centers. The prior art currently being practiced, however, whether air cooled or water cooled is limited in its offerings. It is a concern that current methods being used cannot adequately provide for future generation designs especially when it comes to cooling memory packages such as DIMMs. Consequently, a solution is needed that can extend beyond current systems designs and can be practically applicable in fabrication of future generation environments.